What's New for Elastic Path Commerce 6.17.0

What's New for Elastic Path Commerce 6.17.0

Release Highlights

Elastic Path Commerce 6.17.0 includes the following new features:

Configurable products let catalog managers define products that require shoppers to provide additional information when adding an item to their cart. Fields are configured at the product type level, with the catalog manager able to define field name, type and validation rules for each field. The definition can be done using either the Commerce Manager or the Import/Export Tool. Configurable products provide business flexibility and reduce implementation effort for this common business requirement. Electronic gift certificates are now modeled as configurable products.

The Helix programming model simplifies hypermedia API development and reduces project cost and time to market. Rapid API prototyping is enabled through the hot-deployment of Helix bundles into a running Cortex webapp. The easy to understand programming model allows developers to be onboarded quickly, and extensive documentation with working code examples provides hypermedia patterns and best practices for projects to leverage. Resources developed using previous programming models continue to be supported and can interoperate with Helix resources.

Dynamic fields allow the definition of Cortex entity and form fields at runtime. This is an essential capability when API fields are not known at design time, and was used to implement configurable products.

Cortex structured messages provide the abililty to return JSON-encoded error and informational messages. The representation of blocking conditions has been generalized and is intended to eventually replace needinfo. In the interim, a compatibility flag can be set to convert blocking conditions to needinfo links. All Cortex forms have been converted to return structured messages for validation errors.

Helix advisors provide the hooks for triggering structured messages and blocking conditions after resources are read and before they are updated.

A new tutorial model improves self-learning, concept retention and referencability of tutorial content. Concepts are first explained based on working code examples. Practical excercises along with working answers allow students to solidify their understanding and verify their work. Two educational repositories are available on the Elastic Path GitLab site at https://code.elasticpath.com/groups/education.

The helix-patterns GitLab repository describes hypermedia API development using Helix.

The ep-commerce-examples-6.17 GitLab repository contains examples of creating a new Helix resource and extending an existing one..

The API Development Programming Guide has been reworked to focus on developing Helix resources. Refer to previous versions of the documentation for resource development using the legacy programming model.

Dynamic API fields

The Dynamic Fields section of the API Development Programming Guide describes how to define and implement dynamic fields.

Structured messages and Advisors

The Structured Error Messages section of the API Development Programming Guide describes how to return structured error messages.

The Advisors section of the API Development Programming Guide describes how to implement Advisors and return the results as structured messages.

The Structured Messages section of the Touchpoint Development Guide describes how to handle structures errors returned on Cortex responses.

Source code organization

The Starting Construction Guide was updated to reflect that most projects are now organizing source code in a single source repository rather than using multiple repositories.

Gift certificates

Electronic gift certificates can now be defined as configurable products. Gift certificate configuration is documented in the Commerce Manager User Guide. You can also search for "giftCertificate_Mobee" in the commerce-data project for an Import/Export XML example..

When upgrading:

If you have a custom gift certificate implementation, you may want to consider converting it to use configurable products.

Configuration file locations

Configuration files located in the /etc/ep directory were not fully supported by all Elastic Path applications. This location has been deprecated in favor of configuration in either /ep/conf or ${user.home}/ep/conf (where ${user.home} is the path to your user home directory) .

The Cortex configuration subdirectory structure has also been simplified in these new locations.